Through, Not To

Jude 25

Through, Not To

The doxology that calls the only God the Saviour --- and His Son the road the glory travels

Yahuah alone is the Saviour; Yahushua is how the praise gets home.

--- The Standing Stone ---

Behind “LORD” in your Bible lies a hidden name --- in the Hebrew it is Yahuah Psalm 83:18**; Yahuah is the Father** Isaiah 63:16**; Yahuah is the only God, beside Him there is no other** Isaiah 45:5**; therefore Yahuah the Father is the only true God, leaving no room for a second or third person** 1 Corinthians 8:6**.**

1.1 --- The Verse Sung Past Every Week

Jude closes his short letter with a burst of praise, and most readers sail over it without ever hearing what it actually says. The common assumption is that this glory rises to a three-personed God, with the title “Saviour” pinned somewhere on the Son. But read the words themselves, slowly, and the verse turns out to be far more careful than the doctrine laid on it:

Jude 25

To the only wise God our Saviour, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever. Amen.

1.2 --- “The Only Wise God Our Saviour”

Two things are nailed down before the sentence even moves. There is one God --- “the only wise God” --- and that one God is the Saviour. Not a Saviour standing beside Him. The Saviour. This is no idea Jude invented; it is the steady drumbeat of the prophets. Yahuah Himself says, “I, even I, am Yahuah; and beside me there is no saviour” Isaiah 43:11. “A just God and a Saviour; there is none beside me” Isaiah 45:21. “There is no saviour beside me” Hosea 13:4. Beside Him there is no saviour --- that is as total as language gets. So when Jude calls “the only wise God” our “Saviour,” he is naming the Father, exactly as Isaiah named Him. The Saviour is Yahuah.

1.3 --- “But the New Testament Calls Jesus Saviour”

Here a defender of the doctrine will stop you cold: the New Testament calls Yahushua “Saviour” in plain words --- born “a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord” Luke 2:11, “the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ” Philippians 3:20, and more besides. So how, he demands, can the only God be the Saviour? The answer is not to deny that the Son is called Saviour. He is --- and the very name he carries says so. The answer is to finish the sentence the objector keeps stopping in the middle of, because every place that names the Son a Saviour says, in the same breath, where the title came from.

Read the rest of the verse. “Him hath God exalted with his right hand to be a Prince and a Saviour” Acts 5:31 --- God exalted him to it. “Of this man’s seed hath God… raised unto Israel a Saviour” Acts 13:23 --- God raised him to it. And plainest of all: “the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world” 1 John 4:14 --- the Father sent, and the Son was sent to be it. A saviour who is exalted, raised, and sent to the office did not hold it of himself. He holds it because the only God appointed him to it.

And this is no new arrangement sprung on us in the Gospels. Yahuah is the only Saviour --- “beside me there is no saviour” Isaiah 43:11 --- and yet all through the Hebrew Scriptures He saves His people by raising up deliverers and calling them saviours. “Thou… gavest them saviours, who saved them out of the hand of their enemies” Nehemiah 9:27. “The Lord gave Israel a saviour” 2 Kings 13:5. “Saviours shall come up on mount Zion” Obadiah 21. Not one of those men was a second God. “Beside me there is no saviour” never meant that no deliverer ever stands under Yahuah; it meant no saviour stands beside Him as a rival, no other source of rescue. Yahuah saves --- and He saves through the deliverer He appoints. Yahushua is that deliverer, the greatest of them, the one the Father sent and exalted --- which makes him the Saviour Yahuah gave, not Yahuah Himself.

And mark this last thing, for it ends the “that settles it” reply for good: the very same letters that call the Son “Saviour” call the Father “Saviour” just as plainly --- “God our Saviour” 1 Timothy 1:1, and again 1 Timothy 2:3, and again Titus 2:10. But the two never wear it as equals: the Father is never sent to be Saviour, never raised to it, never exalted into it --- He simply is the Saviour. The Son is sent, raised, and exalted to it, every time. One end of the line always gives the office; the other always receives it. “Saviour” is a shared title for one reason: the Father is the source of the saving, and the Son is the means by which it reaches us. The Father saves; the Son is how He saves.

1.4 --- The Word Their Bible Adds: “Through”

Now look at what the oldest manuscripts add to this verse --- the very text your modern Bible follows. After “the only God our Saviour,” it reads “through Jesus Christ our Lord.” That small word “through” --- dia in the Greek --- is the word for a channel, a means, the road a thing travels on. The glory does not go to Jesus; it goes to the only God through Jesus. He is named as the way the praise reaches the Father, not as a second receiver sharing the Father’s throne.

And mark the irony. This is the reading the modern editions prefer, printed in the very Bibles most often waved as proof of the Son’s deity --- and it does the opposite of what they want. It makes him the door, not the destination. The King James, which does not carry that clause, already names the only wise God as the Saviour all by itself. So whichever text you hold in your hand, the verse fences the one God as Saviour and places the Son outside that title --- as the means, never the mark, of the worship.

1.5 --- The Name That Tells You Who Saves

Even the Son’s own name testifies to this. Yahushua does not mean “he saves.” It means “Yah saves” --- the Father’s name built into the Son’s. When the messenger told Joseph, “thou shalt call his name Yahushua: for he shall save his people from their sins” Matthew 1:21, the name itself pointed past the child to the One behind the saving. Yahuah saves; Yahushua is the name and the means by which He does it. The salvation belongs to the Father, and the Son carries it to us. That is the exact shape of this whole doxology --- glory to the only God, through the Son.

1.6 --- Jude’s Own Word: “Only”

And do not miss how often Jude reaches for one small word. In a letter of twenty-five verses he says only of God again and again --- “the only Lord God” Jude 4 and here “the only wise God our Saviour” Jude 25. He is not the first to bind the Father with that phrase; Paul does it too, calling Him “the only wise God” Romans 16:27 and “the only wise God” 1 Timothy 1:17. Over and over the word fences God in as one. The man who wrote this letter, closing it with the highest praise he could lift, never once reached for a three-personed God to receive it. He praised the only wise God, and he named the Son as the road that praise travels to reach Him.

Conclusion

The Verdict

Jude’s last word is worship, and he aims it with care. The only wise God is the Saviour --- the Father, exactly as Isaiah said, beside whom there is no saviour at all. And Yahushua stands in the sentence as the through: the road the glory travels, the name that itself means “Yah saves.” Turn the door into the destination and you lose them both --- the only God who saves, and the Son He saves us through.

Glory rises to the only God, and travels through His Son to get there --- and a road was never the throne it leads to.